“Maybe my favorite thought experiment along these lines was invented by my former student Andy Drucker. In the past five years, there’s been a revolution in theoretical cryptography, around something called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which was first discovered by Craig Gentry. What FHE lets you do is to perform arbitrary computations on encrypted data, without ever decrypting the data at any point. So, to someone with the decryption key, you could be proving theorems, simulating planetary motions, etc. But to someone without the key, it looks for all the world like you’re just shuffling random strings and producing other random strings as output.
You can probably see where this is going. What if we homomorphically encrypted a simulation of your brain? And what if we hid the only copy of the decryption key, let’s say in another galaxy? Would this computation—which looks to anyone in our galaxy like a reshuffling of gobbledygook—be silently producing your consciousness?”
and last but not least:
“But, in addition to performing complex computations, or passing the Turing Test, or other information-theoretic conditions that I don’t know (and don’t claim to know), there’s at least one crucial further thing that a chunk of matter has to do before we should consider it conscious. Namely, it has to participate fully in the Arrow of Time. ”
But it could matter if its digital vs continuous. <OK longer post and some thoughts a bit off topic perhaps>
Your A,B,C,D … leads to some questions about what is conscious (C) and what isn’t.
Where exactly does the system stop being conscious
1. Biological mind with neurons
2. Very high fidelity render in silicon with neurons modelled down to chemistry rather than just firing pulses
3. Classic neural net spiking approx done in discrete maths that appears almost indistinguishable to 1,2. Producing system states A,B,C,D
4. same as (3) but states are saved/retrieved in memory not calculated.
5. States retrieved from memory many times - A,B,C,D … A,B,C,D … does this count as 1 or many experiences?
6. States retrieved in mixed order A,D,C,B....
7 States D,D,D,D,A,A,A,A,B,B,B,B,C,C,C,C .. does this count 4* or nothing.
A possible cutoff is between 3⁄4. Retrieving instead of calculating makes it non-conscious. But what about caching, some calc, some retrieved?
As you prob know this has been gone over before, e.g. Scott Aaronson. Wonder what your position is?
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1951
with quote:
and last but not least:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf